Drummer Jay Weinberg says he sought therapy after Slipknot fired him

Jay Weinberg has spoken about seeking therapy in the aftermath of being fired by Slipknot in 2023, and he was unusually specific about how bad it got. The drummer described his emotional state at the time as feeling like a tangled ball of rusted barbed wire.

He made the comments in an interview with Bryce Maopolski of HeartSupport, a nonprofit that provides free music-based mental health support to people working in music. That framing matters: it is a conversation aimed at an audience of musicians rather than a press cycle.

Weinberg said what he needed was expertise he did not have, and the ability to see a trajectory that would quiet the anxieties and frustrations he was carrying. Untangling that, he said, was the centre of the problem, and it required finding a therapist where he lives in Tennessee, which itself took time.

He was not new to therapy. In his early twenties, living in New Jersey and New York, he had tried it without finding a good match. It helped somewhat, he said, but nothing that felt like the right fit, and that earlier experience shaped how he approached the search at the end of 2023 and into 2024.

What broke the deadlock was a recommendation from a close friend, the person who married him and his wife. Weinberg said the referral made him comfortable enough to try again, and described the result as an unlocking of a door he had tried many keys on without success.

He still speaks to the same therapist once a week. Weinberg has previously discussed the practical fallout of his exit as well, including the legal limits that kept him from working with other artists, and the band has continued to change around him, most recently confirming Sid Wilson's exit after 28 years. It is a rare piece of candour from inside a metal band whose members have spent their careers behind masks.